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The fundraiser is over and we raised all $3,000 we were aiming for. We will be upgrading the servers soon with some new hardware and building a new development machine as well.
For anyone who donated $50 or more and would like get the free hosting promised, please contact me. Anyone who donated and would like one of the donator badges added to their account please contact me as well. We will start handing these out in the next couple of days.
2006-09-09 - Mediawiki Upgrade To SVN
Today we are in the process of upgrading our Mediawiki install to the SVN Version. This should allow for more frequent upgrades to our installation as well as some cool features (we hope).
The other language wikis will be upgraded as soon as we can get a hold of their respective admins. If your language's wiki doesn't get updated by the end of the week, feel free to pester your local admin.
2006-04-09 - Mediawiki Upgrade
Well today we upgraded Mediawiki to 1.6.2. With that comes some cool new things. There are too many to list, but you can check out http://mediawiki.org/ . one notable addition is the new AJAX search. To use it: just type something into the search box and you should get a nice AJAX response.
Also you may have noticed the new front page look. More changes are coming, but this is basically what it's going to look like. Enjoy.
2006-03-27 - The Squid server arrives
The Squid server has finally come in and its already up and running. The stats are here. So far the squid server has reduced the load on the server from 2.5 to 0.5 at peak times, so we should be good for hardware for a good while hopefully.
- Thrasher 01:20, 28 March 2006 (GMT)
2006-02-18 - Gentoo-Portage.com holds a contest
For those of you interested, http://gentoo-portage.com is holding a contest for a new logo for the beta site. details here
- Thrasher 17:25, 18 February 2006 (GMT)
2006-02-06 - 20,000,000 page views
Just under 5 months ago I posted that we had had over 10 million page views to the wiki. In the short time since then we have doubled that number to 20 million. This is a great milestone for the wiki, and I can't wait until we double the page views again. More Statistics
- Thrasher 18:19, 6 February 2006 (GMT)
Well, the fundraiser was a complete success. We raised all $2,040.00 in just over 2 weeks. We would like to personally thank everyone who donated. Your help is greatly appreciated.
Also the new RAM is already in place. The new server should arrive this week and should be operational about 1 week after that.
- Thrasher 19:42, 31 January 2006 (GMT)
Tro 19:44, 31 January 2006 (GMT)
Over the last week or so there have been some signifigant outages of the wiki and gentoo-portage.com . I'll try to explain them as best I can here
- Jan 25th - 3 minor hiccups caused by me fiddling with some config values
- Jan 28th - ~1 hour outage due to an out of control archiver on the wiki see: Image:Why Archivers Suck Terminal.png
- Jan 29th - The big all day outage. This was the big one and the main reason I'm writing this news item, every so often pecl-apc will cause _something_ to happen that causes apache to fork uncontrollably until it reaches the hard limit set by /etc/limits. subsequently the machine locks up to all external access except ping. ("dont use pecl-apc then!" you say) Unfortunitly I NEED a php caching module such as APC and currently it is the only one that dosent cause this forking problem to happen almost instantly AND works with php5. and before everyone emails me about this see: Jan 30th Afternoon
- Jan 30th Morning - Another APC hiccup caused because of me attempting to use apc_store / apc_fetch the night before cause the fork bomb to happen much faster then the usual ~2 weeks (I wont be trying that again soon)
- Jan 30th Afternoon - I spent most of my afternoon trying other optimizers and other options for speeding up PHP without the fork bombing. No optimizer: almost instant lock due to excessive traffic. Zend Optimizer: Similar effect but took 3 min to happen. Eaccelerator: still does not run properly with my setup.
I have decided to give it a rest for a bit and wont try anything more until the squid proxy is setup; with the traffic this site gets it is difficult for me to try anything and see the results properly.
- Thrasher 22:35, 30 January 2006 (GMT)
Fundraising. That's right. The Wiki is doing some fundraising to upgrade the current server and perhaps even add a second server. Read more ...
Digg Link to the fundraiser
- Thrasher 22:09, 20 January 2006 (GMT)
Over the past year the wiki has grown at an ever increasing pace. In 2005 the traffic increased almost four-fold and we are now receiving just over 30,000 unique visitors per day. we have received many emails. So, in the new year I and the the other admins hope to address some of the emails we have received and attempt to solve as many problems as possible and incorporate as many suggestions as possible.
One common suggestion/complaint refers to the inability to search for words that consist of 3 letters or less. This is how the wiki is setup to prevent some seriously taxing searches. I cannot allow for three letter searches without hurting the wiki's performance. There are a lot of computer-related TLA's (three letter acronyms), however. So, to solve this problem I am suggesting the creation of a lot of new wiki articles. For this I will need the help of as many people as possible.
If you wish to help check out this list of TLA's and either add a TLA to it or create an article on one of the requested ones. This would be a great help to us. I will try to fill out as many of these as I can personally.
Happy New Year to everyone too.
- Thrasher 21:48, 3 January 2006 (GMT)
I would like to apologize to everyone for the outage this weekend, I was out of town when the server went down and was not able to request a ticket to be rebooted from my service provider until late last night.
The website has needed a reboot a couple of times in the last few months, this has been caused by server flooding by archive bots, spam bots and other such bots that request 5 pages a second. So i will be spending some of my holidays putting in some stricter rules on the website to block all archivers and spam bots (as best I can anyway)
Once again sorry for the outage.
- Thrasher 18:02, 19 December 2005 (GMT)
2005-11-12 - New Admins Wanted
We've recently had several admins on the English wiki become inactive or preoccupied with other commitments. In light of this, we're looking for new admins. Basically, you need to have some time each day to look through the RC board and clean/correct/mark-as-valid the edits there. You'll need to be accessible via IRC/IM and subscribed to the development mailing list, so that we could discuss policy changes.
If you're interested, visit the #gw-rc channel on EFNet and talk to either thrasher7 or tro.
UPDATE: We've had several people show up in the channel. Thanks for your interest. It seems that Thrasher is really busy right now and I don't have access to grant you privileges. In order to not lose track of all volunteers, I'm going to suggest that you post on the development mailing list. It's archived and I'm sure Thrasher will read it as soon as he's back and act accordingly. Please include your wiki username and how we can contact you. Again, thanks for your interest. -Tro 05:23, 15 November 2005 (GMT)
UPDATE 2: We're closing the admin call. Thanks for everyone who volunteered. Congratulations to SDibb on becoming a new admin. We're going to select another admin soon. -Tro 06:35, 9 December 2005 (GMT)
- Tro 04:03, 13 November 2005 (GMT)
The wiki is currently under a massive spam/defacement attack. The attacks are coming from mostly random IPs, making it difficult for us to cope with it. We're currently working on a blacklisting mechanism. After the attack is contained we will revert the spammed pages back to their last good state, so you don't need to revert any of the malicious changes right now.
The wiki remains usable, so this attack shouldn't discourage you from contributing.
Update 2005-09-30 The attack is under control and all malicious edits have been reversed.
- Tro 23:49, 29 September 2005 (GMT)
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